Africans started to fight the transatlantic slave trade as soon as it began. Using violent as well as nonviolent means, Africans in Africa, the Americas, and Europe were relentlessly involved in the fight against the slave trade and slavery.

Between 1807 and 1808 Britain and the United States moved to abandon their legal involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Abolitionists had been denouncing and campaigning against it for almost half a century.

From the 1780s until the last slave ship arrived in Cuba in 1867, the illegal portion of the traffic grew steadily until it encompassed the whole of the slave trade. About 1.5 million Africans arrived illegally in the Americas during this period.

After its demise was announced in the Constitution; after its official prohibition in1807; after decades of illicit trafficking; the international slave trade still had support among Southerners and they agitated for its official revival throughout the 1850s.

The ending of the slave trade came about in two stages in most countries. The first was a struggle to pass formal laws against human trafficking, and the second was the fight to make those laws effective in the face of the illegal traffic.